“Earl Aubec and other stories” by Michael Moorcock

 

 

590 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565049864

 

Over the course of the mid-to-late 90s, White Wolf Publishing produced this massive omnibus collection of Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” stories, a recurrent aspect in many of his tales. Earl Aubec and other stories was the fourteenth in this series featuring the character Earl Aubec of Malador, and includes a collection of 33 short stories (only the first of which features Earl Aubec and was already in a previous Elric book). And just what are these stories? *sigh*…okay, here goes: Earl Aubec, Jesting with Chaos, The Greater Conqueror, Going Home, Hanging the Fool, Consuming Passion, Wolf, Environment Problem, The Opium General, A Dead Singer, The Lovebeast, The Ruins, The Golden Barge: A Fable, The Deep Fix, The Real Life Mr. Newman, Goodbye, Miranda, Islands, Some Reminiscences of the Third World War [Casablanca, Going to Canada, Leaving Pasadena, Crossing Into Cambodia], Mars, The Frozen Cardinal, Peace on Earth (with Barrington Bayley), The Mountain, The Time Dweller, Escape from Evening, Waiting for the End of Time…, The Stone Thing: A Tale of Strange Parts, The Last Call, My Life, The Museum of the Future and To Rescue Tanelorn…And I’m going to review each tale individually, too…wait, the hell I am…

 

To give an example of just how long Moorcock has been writing, some of the tales to be found in this particular collection were written by him when he was a precocious 15-year-old; as he admits in the Introduction, “Some are a little embarrassing, a bit loud, a bit coarse…”. To be fair, the same could be said some of his later stories, written when he was an adult, so maybe that’s just his thing. Naturally, the vast majority of these stories deal with aspects of the Eternal Champion; however, if you crack the spine on this thing expecting to see the likes of Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum or even Erekosë, you will be disappointed. These tales work more as attachments to those other, longer and better-known tales. The biggest problem I found with the stories contained herein is that, because they all appear to be a series of one-offs, little (if any) time is spent on character development or background and, thus, it is difficult to really give a damn about any of them, other than the fact that, as the protagonists, you feel obliged to do so; as one story ends and the character is done with, off you go onto the next tale and new character. Was this frustrating? Not really; these are, after all, self-contained short stories in which characters are introduced, a problem is encountered and then resolved by the end.

 

Some are forgettable, some are rather good and some other could even be described as great. Earl Aubec and other stories does what is supposed to do: gather together the tales of the Eternal Champion for the gratification of the reader. Mission accomplished.

“Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art” by Carl Hoffman

 

336 pages, William Morrow, ISBN-13: 978-0062116154

So, one day many years ago I visited my parents and, virtually from the second I walked in the door, my Dad shoved this book, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art by Carl Hoffman into my hands and said, “Here. Read the first chapter”. So I did, and…DAMN.

So, a little background: Michael Clark Rockefeller was the fifth child of New York Governor and former U.S. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, the grandson of American financier John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the great-grandson of Standard Oil cofounder John D. Rockefeller; he disappeared during an expedition in the Asmat region of southwestern Netherlands New Guinea (which is now a part of the Indonesian province of Papua) under mysterious circumstances.

In Savage Harvest, Carl Hoffman claims to have finally solved this old missing persons case while also illuminating a people transformed by years of colonial rule and a culture that continues to be shaped by ancient customs – like, for instance, F*CKING CANNIBALISM. Combining history, art, colonialism, adventure and ethnography, Savage Harvest is a mélange work and a fascinating portrait of the clash of cultures that resulted in the death of one of America’s richest and most powerful scions.

In order to solve this decades-long mystery, Hoffman traveled to the jungles of New Guinea to retrace Rockefeller’s steps while immersing himself in a world of headhunters and cannibals (still doing their thing in 2013, so it would appear), a world of secrets, spirits, hidden customs and forbidden rites – like, for instance, killing a man, decapitating his corpse, cooking his head and eating his brains in order to gain something of his spirit. I repeat...DAMN.

While getting to know many members of the Asmat people – interviewing the elders of the tribe and discovering just what happened to his subject fifty-years before – Hoffman also sorted through many never-before-seen original documents. This after the exhaustive searches of the time uncovered no trace of Rockefeller – and the rumors that he’d been killed and ceremonially eaten, a gruesome tale that the Dutch denied and the Rockefeller family disbelieved but that, according to Hoffman’s research, would appear to be all too true.

This is an enlightening and disturbing book to read – and for any of my bleeding-heart liberal friends who insist on moral relativism and the basic equality of all cultures, I challenge you to read the first chapter of Savage Harvest and not thank God that you weren’t Michael Rockefeller.

“The Diaries of the Family Dracul” by Jeanne Kalogridis

“Covenant with the Vampire”

324 pages, Delacorte Press, ISBN-13: 978-0385313131

“Children of the Vampire”

301 pages, Delacorte Press, ISBN-13: 978-0385314121

“Lord of the Vampires”

347 pages, Delacorte Press, ISBN-13: 978-0385314145

The Diaries of the Family Dracul by Jeanne Kalogridis is a prequal trilogy to Bram Stoker’s Dracula in which much of that original tale is reimagined. The books – Covenant with the Vampire, Children of the Vampire and Lord of the Vampires – were all published in the late 90’s and, as far as I can tell, didn’t make much of an impact, culturally speaking. This is rather surprising as, all things considered, they are well-written and engaging, with characters that are not two-dimensional and a plot that holds together well, even if Kalogridis rewrites whole parts of the original Dracula in the third book (the ending of which…how do I say it…SUCKED).

Covenant with the Vampire truly feels like what Stoker may have written himself is he had taken up Dracula’s tale in the decades before his original story. Like in the original, Dracula is a lord living in Transylvania and the story is told, again like the original, through the diaries of various family members, particularly his great-nephew who arrives from England with his pregnant wife (also a great diary-writer) and his sickly niece, who has been stuck with him here in Transylvania (none of them know he is a vampire, of course). There is much historical detail and flavor here to go along with the creepier aspects of the original story: we have wolves, mysterious specters of the hero’s dead little brother, superstitious peasants, crucifixes, murdered babies and a vampire who is about as evil as you can get rather than dashing, erotic or pitiable. Covenant with the Vampire pays its dues and gives complete respect to the characters created by Bram Stroker (I find that many novels dealing with vampires are simply watered-down imitations of the character Stroker created more than a century ago). Dracula is the ultimate nemesis, but recently he and his kind have become glittery, loving, self-sacrificing…seriously, he’s a bloodsucking fiend who needs to be destroyed. Nothing good can come from “loving” something that sees you as food or that has lost its basic humanity, as modern writers have forgotten.

Children of the Vampire continues the story and Kalogridis’ style is still absorbing, with believable characters that come to life and an engaging storyline. Although warned in this book’s Prologue of Kalogridis’ decision to align her book more-closely with that of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I still found the result to be interesting as the author reinterprets many of the happenings from the original work. Perhaps she did so because the legend is by now an established one and that may have played somewhat of a role in Kalogridis’ writing and prevented her from taking too many artistic liberties with the same. Oh, she is still present, make no mistake, for there is some of the most raw and unadulterated witty writing that I had read in a long time. There is also great detail in Vlad the sadist’s favorite pastime of torture in quite gruesome and vivid detail, so be warned. Children of the Vampire is a weaker book than the first in the series as parts of it drag on and on, especially in the middle. Overall it felt like what it was: the middle book of a trilogy, with the author moving the characters and plot lines to where they need to be for the last book. There are some metaphysical elements which start out interesting, but I got a little tired of pages and pages of them. But Kalogridis isn’t afraid to broach any subject or write any plot twist, and I was never exactly sure what was going to happen, so the unpredictability was nice.

Lord of the Vampires is the last book in the trilogy and by far the weakest. It certainly was ambitious for any author to write a series of prequels to Dracula that eventually overlap with the main book. All of Kalogridis’ extensive research is on display in the series, and the first two are excellent (though definitively noncanonical) attempts to flesh out the story behind Stoker’s magnum opus. Several passages have been lifted and rewritten from Dracula which, in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing as Kalogridis attempts to fit her reworking of Stoker’s story into the original, often with interesting results as we see familiar scenes from different perspectives (one of the brides’ anger at Harker calling her “illspelt” was classic). Oh, and the Countess Elizabeth Bathory shows up, as she is wont to do in any other author’s take on the Dracula myth. For the most part, as an ending to the trilogy Lord of the Vampires is a good book, wrapping up all of the storylines and providing closure for all characters. The writing is a good mix of horror, suspense, thrill, mystery, gore and some even darker subjects is a winning combination. However…the conclusion in which one of the characters becomes a different type of vampire spoilt so much of the story for me. I won’t give it away, but it seemed like Kalogridis wanted a happy ending for her undead brood and it sounded a very false note.

The Diaries of the Family Dracul was, then, an excellent trilogy and a clever reworking of one of literature’s most enduring characters. While the ending leaves much to be desired, I won’t let that take away from the overall quality of the series.

“Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire” by Jason Goodwin

 

368 pages, Henry Holt and Co., ISBN-13: 978-0805040814

In his book Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, Jason Goodwin elegantly combines a deft historical summary of the Sublime Porte with the buoyant prose and idiosyncratic focus of a travel writer. While ostensibly in chronological order, the book is in fact organized thematically, as Goodwin leaps from one topic to another to try and delve into the psyche of this long-lasting though long-perished empire. Because of this eclectic organization, Goodwin is able to take the full measure of a realm riddled with paradox: a Turkish empire whose shock troops were Balkan Slavs and a bellicose state built through war that often governed its conquests with a light hand, a necessary approach given the plethora of faiths, cultures and nationalities that fell under Ottoman rule. For its time, it was a rather benign and even tolerant lordship, especially compared to many of the other states then in existence.

Before the Ottoman Empire became the Sick Man of Europe, it was, at its height, a society that was both civilized and tolerant, again relative to other nations around it and, it must always be stressed, so long as Turks and Islam remained on top. One shining example of this trait is when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 they were warmly received by the Sultan in Constantinople, Belgrade, Salonika and Sofia (as second-class subjects, to be sure, but tolerated in a way unknown to them in their native Spain). In Goodwin’s telling, this is due to the essence of an empire that built itself on militarism and a proud nomadic past, demonstrating convincingly that these shaped Ottoman interpretations of Islam and, so, affected how it could impact their rule on Turks and other Muslims to people of different races and faiths, from Osman’s modest beylik through six centuries of an empire that spanned three continents and 7.6 million square miles.

While Lords of the Horizons is steeped in orientalist apologia, it is not meant to forgive the Ottomans, but rather to capture the way they were perceived by their European counterparts and the atmosphere of much of its early historiography. It cannot be denied that, while war and superstition ruled Christian Europe, the Islamic Ottoman Empire thrived and glittered with mathematical, architectural and artistic accomplishment (at least for a time). Goodwin is great at describing how, for three hundred years before its final collapse after WWI, the empire survived even though it was perpetually on the verge of collapse, attributing the calcified empire’s sad decline not only to corruption and the rise of the West, but to the Turk’s prideful ignorance of the West, a vanity that eventually deprived the empire of the fruits of modernity. While its collapse may not have been avoidable, it could, perhaps, have been less painful.

Some people in other reviews I have read were critical of Goodwin’s ambitious narrative, pitched as it is at a popular audience and organized in a generally chronological order through a scattered arrangement and meandering pace. But given the Ottoman Empire for so many centuries attempted to hold time still, these topical chapters, moving through time slowly forward while attending to aspects such as The Cage of the prison that became the seraglio, Hoards as to the immense if misplaced wealth of the empire and Shamming regarding the corruption of the state all appear to have been wisely chosen. And as good as Goodwin is at blending political, cultural and military affairs together, his work is distinguished by stylish writing and a sharp eye for just the right anecdote (the epilogue, built as it is around the fate of the empire’s famous stray dogs, is perhaps the best example of an informative and yet moving piece of writing).

There have been other, more exhaustive books on the Ottoman Empire – Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire by Caroline Finkel comes to mind, reviewed on October 12^th, 2012, or The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire by Lord Kinross, reviewed on April 20^th, 2015 – but few have been as esoteric and, thus, insightful as Lords of the Horizons.

“Mapping the World: A History of Exploration” by Peter Whitfield

 

263 pages, The Folio Society

If you’ve never heard of Mapping the World: A History of Exploration by Peter Whitfield it might be because you already own New Found Lands: Maps in the History of Exploration, of which this edition is a reissue. This version, put out by The Folio Society, is stellar (as you’d might expect), printed on buckram paper with a dedicated slipcase. But it is much more than that, for while your typical exploration narrative can be a tale of adventure and endurance, a technical account of navigation and seamanship, or a political history of the overseas empires that were built up in the wake of the explorers, Whitfield took a different approach by focusing on the maps that the explorers themselves used and revealing how both the explorers and their patrons understood their expanding world and their place in it, what they were seeking and how they thought they could achieve it, and how they integrated new knowledge into their evolving world view.

The maps in Mapping the World present the geographical ideas of the time, making plain the power that came with increasing technical and geographical knowledge. They also serve as evocative and poignant reminders of the limited knowledge of these explorers, for up until very recent times (as these maps show) there have been areas of the world remaining to be explored and new found lands to discover. This lavishly illustrated book progresses chronologically, starting with the explorers of the ancient world, covering the East, the New World, the Pacific, Australia and the Modern Era. It will enrich our understanding of the voyages of discovery undertaken over the past 2000 years and will delight any map or history lover (like me). I’m very pleased with myself for renewing my Folio Society membership in whatever year this book was offered and am glad that this ornament to exploration now adorns my bookshelf.